quote:
Originally posted by Snake
I will tell you that using a Raid-0 is a Very, Very, Bad idea. Spaning a OS over two drives is just seting your self up for disaster.
As stated elsewhere in this thread, RAID-0 doubles (or triples, if you use three drives, and so forth) the chance of drive failure. The MTBF of the array is MTBF of a single drive / number of drives.
Given the high MTBF of modern drives, it's still not a huge risk -- but it is a risk, nevertheless. The risk is usually taken for performance reasons, since good RAID-0 should have data transfer rate almost equal that of a single drive * the number of drives.
quote:
Originally posted by Snake
All these options are good but if you were going to make a RAID-0 I would recomand buying 2 more dirves and make it a RAID-5 with backup.
You only need one more drive for RAID-5 -- the minimum is considered to be 3 and theorethically it could work with 2 (but then you would be much better off using RAID-1). However, the more drives you have, the more cost effective it becomes -- the capacity of RAID-5 is the combined capacity minus one drive.
The problem with RAID-5 is horrible write performance, which gets worse with the number of drives -- after each write, the corresponding data zones on the remaining drives have to be read (if not already cached), the parity computed, and the corresponding parity zone updated. Software RAID-5 (which includes most low end motherboard-integrated controllers) is pathetic and I'd not consider it if I couldn't afford a decent controller, with an adequate dedicated processor and a good amount of dedicated cache memory.
